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Connecting two switches to a router

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DCal430

Diamond Member
I have two switches that I need to connect to a router for my house.

Should I connect Switch A to port 1 of the router and Switch B to port 2 of the router, or should I connect Switch A to port 1 of the router and Switch B to port 1 of the Switch A? Or does this not really make much of a difference.
 
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It wont make much of a difference performance wise but that would make switch A a point of failure for switch B then again switches fail so rarely...
 
Best to try to minimize daisy chaining, so switch 1 to the router and switch 2 to the router. Or get a switch with more ports.

Though either way will work and probably not really make much of a difference in terms of every day usage especially for a low traffic network.
 
My apologies, I know technically these questions belong in the networking section, but I thought I would get more responses in OT.
 
Performance difference won't really be noticeable, but you should put both switches on separate LAN ports from the router (assuming your router has a built-in switch with multiple LAN ports, as 98% of them do).

Why did you get two switches instead of one with more ports? Three power cords will be a pain to keep tidy.
 
Ichinisan said:
Performance difference won't really be noticeable, but you should put both switches on separate LAN ports from the router (assuming your router has a built-in switch with multiple LAN ports, as 98% of them do).

Why did you get two switches instead of one with more ports? Three power cords will be a pain to keep tidy.
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Because more than 30 ports were needed. These are two 24 port switches.
 
Wrong forum.

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Plug both switches into 2 of the switch ports on the router.

The router will be able to see EVERYTHING, so dont try to hide from it.
 
Option 1 is the best.

Option 2 would be good if you were trying to connect two rooms with multiple wired clients on each side.
 
If both switches are unmanaged and you're not doing complex vlans, it won't matter unless you create a bottleneck somehow. If they're Gig switches or 100MB switches, just make sure the 100Mb or 1000Mb lights light up or check your cables. You want to make sure you've got max speed at full duplex. For that many hops you probably won't notice a difference.
 
DCal430 said:
Does the router only see the switches or does it see all of the devices attached to the switches?
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Assuming you're using SOHO (small office/home office) devices, so no vlans, unmanaged switches, then everything on the switches will be able to see each other. It all operates at Layer 2 of the OSI model.

If it's not standard SOHO gear, open a thread in the Networking section and post up what devices you have and what you're trying to do.
 
ch33zw1z said:
Option 1 is the best.

Option 2 would be good if you were trying to connect two rooms with multiple wired clients on each side.
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Actually the best option is to use one of the switches as the core, plug the router in to Switch 1 and the other switch in to Switch 2.

I assume the router is just handling internet traffic, if that is the case, the switch built in to the router (those LAN ports) shouldn't be used as your network's core switch. You should use one of the 24 port switches as your core, with your highest bandwidth demand devices plugged in to that and the lower bandwidth devices in to the second switch.

In general you don't want devices to have to span multiple switches in order to get to their final destination. So if a client on switch 1 needed to get to a resource on switch 2, it would have to go switch 1 -> router -> switch 2. Internet traffic is generally pretty low compared to intra-LAN traffic, so the router being the shortest hop for network clients is generally not the way you want to go.

You'll utilize the networking capabilities of the gear to the utmost that way.
 
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azazel1024 said:
Actually the best option is to use one of the switches as the core, plug the router in to Switch 1 and the other switch in to Switch 2.

I assume the router is just handling internet traffic, if that is the case, the switch built in to the router (those LAN ports) shouldn't be used as your network's core switch. You should use one of the 24 port switches as your core, with your highest bandwidth demand devices plugged in to that and the lower bandwidth devices in to the second switch.

In general you don't want devices to have to span multiple switches in order to get to their final destination. So if a client on switch 1 needed to get to a resource on switch 2, it would have to go switch 1 -> router -> switch 2. Internet traffic is generally pretty low compared to intra-LAN traffic, so the router being the shortest hop for network clients is generally not the way you want to go.

You'll utilize the networking capabilities of the gear to the utmost that way.
Click to expand...

The router will also connect the wireless devices to the network and act as a DNLA server for all connected devices.
 
At any time 5 to 30 devices will need to be able to stream media files from the router, but this could be any connected device. It will be usually closer to 8 or so devices.
 
DCal430 said:
At any time 5 to 30 devices will need to be able to stream media files from the router, but this could be any connected device. It will be usually closer to 8 or so devices.
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Good luck with that. I suspect the streaming will be more of a problem than the network. Unless you are streaming animated gifs or something.

Majority of DLNA routers have difficulty streaming to 2 devices if transcoding and 4-6 if just raw streaming. 30 will likely simply not work.
 
imagoon said:
Good luck with that. I suspect the streaming will be more of a problem than the network. Unless you are streaming animated gifs or something.

Majority of DLNA routers have difficulty streaming to 2 devices if transcoding and 4-6 if just raw streaming. 30 will likely simply not work.
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Would a good server with a good processor be better?
 
So the house has multiple rooms, each bed room has two ethernet ports, one will be for a entertainment portion with a TV, and one for computer or laptop, or what ever they would want to use it. There is also wifi. The living room and dining room have TVs. There are a lot of network ports in this house. They want to be able to make it so any device can stream music, movies, and what ever they want from the drive on the router.

Even if 5 devices are streaming videos from the router, and 6 devices are streaming high quality music, it will work flawlessly.
 
It really sounds like you're planning on plugging in a USB hard drive or flash drive to the router and hoping to stream from that to multiple clients. You'll have a difficult time making that work, SOHO routers with USB sharing won't be able to keep up with your demand. You'll want a PC of some kind serving those files.
 
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